Interview with Adam Liebman, Rappaport Prize Finalist

What I really enjoyed about your paper was the deep critical look at waste and reuse relationships that you offer. What are the most important findings from your work that you want to encourage other scholars to think about?

The paper examines waste politics in Kunming, the capital city of southwest China’s Yunnan Province. In particular, I focus on tensions between a large population of rural migrants who make a living trading scrap and a private entrepreneur who has struggled for over ten years to regulate, reform, and monopolize the city’s informal scrap trade. While conducting fieldwork I became fascinated with disjunctions between the aesthetics of colloquial scrap trading on the one hand, and the environmentalist aesthetics of “renewable resource recycling” on the other. Seeking to understand this disjuncture—seen through different imagery, colors, language, and practices—led me in two different directions.

I’ll begin with scrap trading. One of the things that surprised me was that rural migrant scrap traders were not absolutely marginalized. Although they often endured harassment and fines, it was only the authorities and, as they put it, “those people with money” who looked down on them. Other low-income urban inhabitants often had good relationships with scrap traders, and some regularly hung around informal trading stations not just to sell scrap, but also to enjoy a nice chat, or to sit and flip through piles of old books and newspapers before they were loaded up and sold off. I found that scrap trading stations served as crucial nodes in what I came to call “scrap sociality”—a lively frontier-like sociality characterized by competition, fraud, and hierarchization on the one hand, and emergent forms of collaboration and collective identity formation on the other.

This heterogeneous collection of urban inhabitants performs the labor needed for waste matter to materialize as value-bearing scrap instead of valueless garbage. And, this labor is contingent on habits of attentively caring for everyday objects in domestic settings and propensities to take advantage of the matter available in one’s milieu in ways which transgress capital’s commodity-property regimes. There is a fairly distinct set of aesthetic forms associated with this realm, much of which is linked to the socialist past when the state instituted the collection and reuse of all waste matter and heavily promoted thrift and the comprehensive utilization of all material resources.

The environmentalist aesthetics of “renewable resource recycling” also shows traces of this past, but more prominently reflects moral imaginaries of recycling from the West which stress individual responsibility and environmental protection. The entrepreneur who is trying to reform the industry, “Zhang Ge”, has intently studied the recycling systems of other countries, which inform his vision for a recycling system in Kunming. Meanwhile, a different set of powerful actors in China have been struggling against the importation of materials which in the U.S. are called “recyclables”, but they label “foreign garbage”. This loose coalition highlights the ways transforming this matter into raw materials for manufacturing can be extremely dangerous and polluting, especially when unregulated.

Exposing the pollution which is generated by processing scrap, whether it is from domestic or international sources, has become a common genre for investigative journalism in China, and the common knowledge that so-called “recycling” processes can be heavily polluting constrains Zhang Ge’s ability to bring a positive environmental connotation to scrap trading. In this way, waste politics in China engages a double figure of “recycling” as both an intervention in the rapid depletion of natural resources, and as a polluting globalized industry reliant on China’s cheap labor and inadequately enforced environmental regulations. It was fascinating to see the ways in which scrap traders selectively draw on both sets of aesthetic forms as they balance maintaining good relations with other low-income urban inhabitants and minimizing disdain by the authorities and new middle class.

What key discussions in environmental anthropology does your work address?

Paying close attention to how waste matter materializes as such, and conversely, how scrap is made alongside waste, has helped me address what I see as a crucial, ongoing task for environmental anthropology. That is, the need to find better ways of conceptualizing how forms and forces that are intrinsic to capitalism interact with nature in the broadest sense of the word—or better understanding “capitalism in the web of life” in Jason Moore’s terms. In particular, I’ve never been satisfied with descriptions of people, places, processes, or phenomena as being inside or outside of capitalism. It strikes me that these spatial metaphors just don’t capture how capital motivates great movements and reorganizations of matter, and how these movements and reorganizations are always mediated by entangled human and nonhuman agencies. I am inspired by Anna Tsing’s newest monograph and her term “pericapitalist”—that which is “simultaneously inside and outside capitalism”—but I have wondered what would happen if we did away with spatial metaphors altogether.

My ethnographic focus on scrap trading helped me shift to rethinking “the commodity form” itself, which I have come to see as a motivating presence that enlists humans to capture, utilize, and move matter in certain ways, without foreclosing other possibilities. It also helped me see how the city can be, among other things, a resource frontier which hosts a frontier-like sociality. Both ideas challenge some of the deeply engrained spatial preconceptions that those of us working in the environmental anthropology and political ecology traditions tend to hold: that the messy edges where noncapitalist forms of living and primitive accumulation meet will always be distant from the most concentrated centers of state-capitalist power—i.e. far away from the capitalist metropolis.

By looking at the city as a resource frontier, I not only highlight that the city is comprised of an incredibly complex set of material assemblages and flows, but also how matter in and of the city can be repurposed by a set of human agents who are attuned to material possibilities which bypass norms of private property, consumption, and disposability. As such, the waste-filled city can provide for ways of living athwart the state’s regulatory apparatus, formal economy, and middle class, even if such ways of living ultimately serve to reorient excess matter towards renewed commodity form futures as scrap.

Why Kunming? How did you come to work there, and what about it offers unique insights for your work?

I’ve lived in Kunming on and off since 2007, when I had a fellowship for intensive Mandarin language study. Before my PhD program at UC Davis I completed a MA in International Studies and Environment & Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. My thesis was about an activist coalition, partly based in Kunming, which helped pressure the authorities into delaying a major dam building project on the Nu River in northwestern Yunnan Province. While conducting fieldwork in the river valley, I found that some locals were ambivalent about hydropower development, but were extremely concerned about a different problem: garbage. Plastic-wrapped consumer commodities were increasingly arriving in the region, leading to a proliferation of waste, sickened livestock, and polluted waterways. One of my main interlocuters had made great efforts to organize his community and deal with the issue, but had failed to find any lasting solutions. He asked for my help, but at that time I had nothing to offer. This troubled me in the years that followed, and, as China’s “garbage crisis” emerged as a top concern across the nation, I decided to focus my dissertation research on the issue.

Back in Kunming I started to pay more attention to the complex social worlds associated with scrap trading. Kunming is an attractive destination for rural migrants from many different provinces. Relatively low rents, lax regulations, and mild weather year-round have ensured that there are a particularly large number of rural migrants plying the scrap trade in Kunming: 24,000 by one estimate; 70,000 by another. Although Kunming is considered only a midsized city by Chinese standards, its location in China’s celebrated hotspot of biodiversity in Yunnan Province has led the city government to push especially hard to brand Kunming as China’s “greenest” city.

This has framed the problem of “garbage” in interesting, contradictory ways. On the one hand, motivated by notions of urban order, aesthetics, and hygiene, which historically trace back much further than does environmental discourse, there has been a big effort to contain waste and move it out of the city—a strategy of the “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” variety. On the other hand, there is a growing coalition led by NGO leaders, journalists, filmmakers, and others which thinks about waste not simply as “matter out of place”, but also in a way which highlights ecological entanglements that have multiscalar time-space reverberations. They focus on toxins which circulate and distribute into air, water, soils, crops, and livestock after garbage is burned, dumped, or buried. For this coalition, the out-of-sight, out-of-mind strategy is not at all satisfactory.

Working with these different actors has helped me see how waste matter generates effects that reverberate through intertwined social, ecological, and economic worlds; and how actors involved with waste attempt to capture, harness, and appropriate such matter. I see common academic conceptions of waste as both “matter out-of-place” and as “the political other of capitalist value” in Chinese waste politics. However, I see another conception of waste, as matter out of control, highlighting the complex impacts of waste matter which exceed the experiential space and time scales of humans. Whereas the commodity form can enlist humans to capture, utilize, and move matter in certain ways, waste matter itself becomes particularly generative when the taming effects of the commodity form are absent and it is thrust into new life worlds, and entangled in new relations.

Tell us a bit about your research process as a whole. What methods did you find particularly useful in your research and why? What was distinctive about your research process?

The dissertation is primarily based on two years of ethnographic research in Kunming, but my methods extend far beyond “the field” as a bounded place. Through second-order modes of participant observation, I engage with the films, news stories, artistic works, and other media productions which shape and at times reframe fieldwork experiences. For example, activist filmmaker Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China (2016)—an intimate visual portrayal of one family’s efforts to make a living processing imported plastic waste—has provided me with an opportunity to engage the different media processes through which political struggles over waste are refracted. The film, and the politics that it has helped propel, has led me to rethink how colonial history and the state must be considered together with the entanglements of capital, urbanization, and waste that I am examining.

I also rely on more conventional ethnographic methods such as informal interviews and participant observation. At the beginning of my fieldwork, I actually really struggled with interviews. Communication was a problem, which made me feel like I was failing as an ethnographer. In retrospect, I think I was having difficulty shaking the subconscious image of the heroic, lone anthropologist immersed in a foreign land. I reluctantly started working with assistants, and after that, everything was much better. Of course, these assistants all became collaborators who pushed me to think about things differently.

The process made me rethink another methodological misconception I held: that either my language skills would be good enough, or that they wouldn’t, requiring a translator. In my case, there were many shades of grey in-between. Scrap traders in Kunming come from many different parts of China, both near and far. Some are more comfortable conversing in Kunming dialect—or a mixture of Kunming dialect and their hometown dialect—while others are more comfortable (and capable) of conversing in standard Mandarin, which is what I speak. Some traders were quite interested in me and asked a lot of questions about how scrap industries work in the U.S. Others were more comfortable speaking across less cultural distance with my assistant. Gender and my status as a white foreigner also shaped these interactions. Every interview was a unique negotiation with all of these factors, which ended up being really productive.

I do believe now that the more interviews one does in the field, the better. Not for “objectivity” per se, but rather for simply increasing the diversity of voices and encounters to work with later when crafting writing. In the end, I conducted over 120 interviews, which was far more than I had planned. Once I started really connecting with scrap traders, garbage pickers, long-time Kunming residents, and others, I just wanted to hear everyone’s stories and opinions, and I felt like I was discovering so much through these interactions. It was quite difficult for me to finally stop and move on.

You really foregrounded language in your paper—why was it so important to examine how people talk about waste in Kunming, and how does it differ from conceptualizations of waste in the US, for instance?

Waste is often defined generally as that which is without use or value. Yet, it is also clear that what counts as waste is always relative and historically specific. Conceptions of waste themselves are also highly variable. Thus, when I began the project I was careful not to assume that the Chinese terms used to talk about waste were equivalent to the terms I used in English, and not assume that waste matter itself can be taken as commensurable. This is an approach I generally strive to take in my research: to investigate the ways in which hypothetical equivalences and chains of translations which link concept-objects such as “waste” across languages and life worlds are constructed, conventionalized, and contested. To me this is what it means to examine the politics of translation.

The colloquial Chinese phrase that captured my attention when first starting the project was feipin huishou (废品回收). This phrase is used today by rural migrants who specialize in the business of buying used, broken, or excess materials. Some scholars automatically assume that it should be translated as “waste recycling”, but to construct this hypothetical equivalence is to completely miss an opportunity to think through the specificity of these practices and to bracket out the moral environmentalist connotations which tend to come with the term “recycling”.

The first term in the phrase, feipin, includes two characters. The character fei occurs in a cluster of terms signifying waste, ruins, and discards—i.e. entities associated with a lack of value; while pin is used to indicate goods, products, and commodities—i.e. useful and valuable material assemblages. Considered as a category for objects which are both valueless and valuable, feipin sets up an apparent paradox which serves as a nice springboard into questions related to materiality and commodity form. The other term in the phrase, huishou, also includes two characters which together indicate a kind of “taking back”, which aptly describes what occurs. Scrap buyers take back a portion of the excess matter produced and harvested daily in the city in exchange for small amounts of cash. They then sell this matter to larger scale traders, who in turn sell it to even larger scale traders, and on up until much of the valuable excess makes its way back into factory production and more legible processes of commodity-making. Although feipin huishou was the primary phrase used in the collective era by the state, today environmentally-minded reformers tend to see it as too colloquial and provincial, and instead use terms such as “renewable resources” and “recirculation”. They also connect with circular economy discourse to try to reinvent the industry in a way which imbues these practices with some of the moral connotations of re-cycling.

Any advice for other students at your career stage?

When I got back to UC Davis a couple of years ago, I had a bit of a difficult time adjusting to the lack of structure that comes with being post-field. I found the dissertation to be too large of a project to wrap my brain around, and that feeling was preventing me from accomplishing much writing. One way that I dealt with this was to join and organize a bunch of conference panels. That really helped me with the structure problem and helped me get started on dissertation writing. I also found the conferences more enjoyable than I expected. Through them I made some great friends who have also become collaborators. Submitting works for the graduate paper prizes that are associated with AAA, including the Rappaport Prize, was an extension of this strategy, and I am very glad that I did it. It’s been a great experience and it gave me the opportunity to meet many different scholars who are doing important work.

In terms of writing, I think it is very helpful to be mindful of writing process. There are many useful tips out there. Read them and try them! I’m very lucky that at UC Davis Alan Klima regularly teaches a seminar that is focused entirely on writing exercises and techniques. One technique which works especially well for me, and which many of us at Davis use, is to write with other people in timed 25-minute segments. It’s long enough that you can accomplish a small goal—like finish a paragraph, or do some loose generative writing on a new idea—but it’s also short enough that you can tell yourself “just keep going for [x] more minutes!” and in that way, resist the urge to hop on social media, or go pet the cat, or do whatever you tend to do that is more immediately gratifying than dissertation writing. After 25 minutes, we take five minutes to stretch, rest, and chat. I strive to do six sessions at a time (three hours total) most days. It doesn’t always work out that way, but I find it helpful to have feasible goals and and some structure.